According to this report, out of 1,877 dollar billionaires worldwide, 596 have
their homes in China. 537 dollar billionaires live in the US – which was until now the leading country for the super-rich. Noteworthy is that the figure for China does not include billionaires
residing in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the first two of which formally belong to the Chinese state. (Together, these three entities are home to another 119 billionaires.)

This means that even without the Chinese billionaires residing in Hong Kong and
Macao, 31.8% of the super-rich layer of the global monopoly capitalists are Chinese. Of course, if we compare the figure of billionaires with the total population per individual country, the
Western imperialist countries and Japan are still way ahead of China. Nevertheless, it is an undisputable and crucial fact that nearly a third of the top layer of global monopoly capitalists has
its home in the Chinese state and is closely networked with the ruling state apparatus.

There are persons who claim that China is still a “deformed workers state.” Do
they want to tell us that these 596 super-super-rich are “socialist” billionaires?! Do others, who belittle China as a “semi-colonial” country which supposedly serves US imperialism as an
extended workbench, still deny that this Asian country is home of a potent monopoly capitalist class – one of the global “big players”?!

No, the simple truth is that China became capitalist long ago (in the early 1990s)
and through two and half decades of hyper-accumulation of capital, a significant big bourgeoisie has emerged there. As we have elaborated in a number of works, China has become an emerging
imperialist power.

For our analysis of China as an emerging imperialist country we refer readers to various
works of Michael Pröbsting: